Susan and I have been rewatching the 90s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are now just a few episodes from the series finale. If you ever watched it, you know that the adventures of our protagonist and her Scoobie gang occur during high school and college. So, it is no surprise that the idea of a student’s permanent record appears in that series now and again.
The permanent record, a fraud perpetrated by school authorities on the student body is a pernicious construct that suggests that whatever peccadillos or rule infractions that a student makes during his early education are recorded in some way that can be subsequently exploited to embarrass the student or limit his/her choices and opportunities. The permanent record is a form of intimidation not unlike the threats that religious authorities make of eternal suffering in Hell. It is a device to encourage compliance and obedience.
All of my abecedarian friends know this of course, just as priests and church officials know that Hell holds only as much reality as believers give it. The thing is that most students do not know this until much later in adulthood. And there lies the power of the deception.
If someone tried to dig up my high school and college permanent record, they would likely find little more than a few mentions of me in yearbooks, transcripts, and perhaps school newspapers. It would be a flimsy skeleton of my life during those years – just as it would be for almost all of us including those with the most checkered pasts.
And then there is Donald J. Trump who has had both a military academy and university sign non-disclosure agreements regarding his years at those institutions. We have no insight into his academic performance or achievements or anything else from those years.
What the hell is that all about? We do not know, but I conjecture that it is not about academic performance but rather about allegations and/or reports of misdeeds and delinquency. He has, in effect, had his scholastic past sealed as if it had been a juvenile record of delinquency or crime.
What might we find in Trump’s record of disciplinary actions? It seems likely to me that we would find evidence that his misdeeds as an adult began in his formative years. Was he accused of adolescent rape? Was he found to be cheating during his exams? Perhaps he attempted to bribe or use money to silence someone who could have caused him ridicule or embarrassment?
I think that Trump’s corruption is a life-long pattern, and nothing would be as persuasive of this as finding evidence of it in his permanent record.